


Monochrome

by welzes



Series: Spectrum [1]
Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 04:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14464539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/welzes/pseuds/welzes
Summary: In a world where soulmates bless one another with the gift of color, Lucilius is born alone.





	Monochrome

On your sixth birthday, your parents take you and your brother to a facility, where a throng of children your age stand with their guardians inside the entrance. Once your family is settled, an adult escorts you to a room, sits you down on a chair, and pulls out a pile of cards.

Each card has two circles. The first is red and gray; the second, yellow and gray; third, blue and gray. The gray circles vary in their tint and shade, corresponding to the intensity of the hue next to them.

The adult, who introduces herself as the proctor, asks you to point to the gray circle. You obey again, then again, and then again—until there are no more cards left, only the hard set in the proctor's brow and her pursed lips.

She tells you to stay still and leaves the room. A minute later, she comes back inside with an older man, who sits down across you where she had been seated earlier. The man twines his hands together and looks at you.

He commands you to be honest.

“Did you lie?”

“No,” you say.

Whatever he means, you did not lie. Your parents did not raise you to be dishonest.

The man and the proctor look at each other. The man rises to stand in the corner while the proctor slides into her seat, shuffling the cards.

You repeat the task you were given earlier. The proctor shows you a card and asks you to point to the gray circle, and you do so—again, then again, and then again. All that's changed is the order of the colors.

When you finish, the proctor's shoulders droop and the man shakes his head. They escort you back out to where your parents and brother are waiting. The proctor leaves you with your brother, who's sipping on some juice, to join the man in a private discussion with your parents.

The hallway is quiet, so you hear the whispers of their conversation.

“Lucifer is doing well. His deficient color is red. Now, about Lucilius . . .”

As far as birthdays go, you've never forgotten this one.

* * *

On your first day of the school year, you find your schoolmates abuzz with talk of deficient colors. That's what the adults call them. Your peers simply refer to their missing colors as just that.

When you and Lucifer sit down next to each other, a crowd forms around your desks.

“What's your missing color?” they ask one after another.

“My missing color is red,” says your brother.

“I don't have a deficient color,” you say, though you still don't understand why that is.

Someone in the burgeoning crowd accuses you of lying. Your deficient color is meant to lead you to your soulmate, the one fated to fill in your incomplete palette. You and your peers were taught that everyone has a soulmate. You can't possibly not have a deficient color.

And yet, you don't.

“My brother is not a liar,” says your brother, crossly.

That doesn't stop others from nicknaming you Lying Lucy for the rest of lower education. It bothers you, and one day your mother catches the tail end of it as she picks you and your brother up after school. But when she asks what that's about, suspicion laced in her words, you shrug and don't say anything.

* * *

Your parents are out for the evening on a personal night together. They've left you and your brother with your much older cousin, Lucio, who sits the two of you down in the living room to watch an educational channel while he chips away at his homework. Lucifer loses himself in the television show, but you sit next to Lucio and look at the complicated equations and graphs that are beyond your understanding.

When Lucio gets up to grab a drink, you follow him into the kitchen. You call his name.

“What is it, Lucilius?” he asks. Lucio is the only one who can tell you and your brother apart, even when you've swapped clothes and managed to fool your own parents.

“What's your deficient color?” you ask.

“My deficient color? It's yellow. Why do you ask?”

“You can't see yellow. Lucifer can't see red. But I see everything.”

“Yes, we call that a full color vision. It's very rare.”

“Am I broken?”

Your question seems to stun Lucio, who stares at you with his mouth agape. Then he bends down to his knees and beckons for you to come closer. You do, and he gathers you in his arms.

“You're not broken,” he tells you as he strokes your back. “If anything, you were born more complete than any of us. You are truly blessed.”

Your cousin is a deeply spiritual individual. He sees the good in everything and reminds you of it time and again. As he holds you, you start to believe that he might be right—that there isn't actually anything wrong with you, even though the proctor had apologized to your parents about your condition.

* * *

Then you're older, maybe wiser, and neck-deep in cynicism. You exhibit great intellect beyond your years, earning the recognition of your teachers and peers; however, your only worth lies in your academic achievements. You can still see all the colors imaginable, and your cohorts still look at you oddly when you say so.

Sometimes, someone finds you reading by yourself and asks, “Please go out with me.”

“I’m Lucilius,” you say, and they gape like a fish out of water once they realize that they’ve got the wrong twin.

They usually rush off afterward. Some apologize to you first, and you think this is ridiculous. They only care about their wounded pride. After all, who are you to them, besides someone who greedily holds onto his wholeness?

You do not understand these people with deficient colors. At the same time, they don’t understand you for passing a test that was designed to fail—not even Lucio, who casts your lack of a defect in an unending positive light.

No one lets you forget. You often find yourself sitting in your room and staring down at the pages of your textbooks, searing their clinical words into your memory. Then there’s a knock and Lucifer enters, greets you with a smile, and asks if you’d like to study together out in the garden.

You are the outcast, and you’ve long come to terms with this fact. But the world is a cold, cruel place for depriving your perfect brother of its colorful blessing.

* * *

The years pass you by in a blur, and suddenly you are the youngest researcher in the community. During the first conference you attend as an accredited professional, you meet an experienced peer who's colorblind.

As opposed to your full color vision, his is a monochromatic swatch of black and white and gray. If Beelzebub has a soulmate, he wouldn’t know, and he voices his indifference to the matter all of once.

“This is a community of science,” he says. “Such a superstitious concept has no place in it.”

“Oh? I wonder, is it not the other way around?” you reply.

Beezelbub acknowledges this with the tip of his chin, but his opinion will not be swayed.

“Either way, the two meet poorly from a research angle.”

He's correct. For their long-lived history, soulmates and deficient colors are an understudied field with no proper methods with which to measure the outcomes. You know, because you’ve pored over countless texts in search of a single answer, only to turn up empty-handed.

You hum in thought. “Sooner or later, that’ll have to change.”

When you leave the building, it’s with the realization that this is the first lucid conversation you’ve had with someone else in years. Your steps feel a little lighter; your skin, less ill-fitting; and your head, clearer. You wouldn't mind engaging in research with Beelzebub.

* * *

A year later, Beelzebub introduces you to his research aide, Belial, who sidles up to you the moment he leaves the room to retrieve some data.

“So, Cilius, I hear that you don’t have a soulmate,” says Belial, draping an arm over your shoulder.

“And?” you ask.

“I don’t, either.”

You pause, the foreign arm weighing heavily on your shoulder.

Belial continues, “You know, most people are hard-pressed to find their soulmates; yet here we are, denied of that privilege since birth. Oh, I never minded—saves me the time and energy of looking for someone who doesn’t exist. But people are so caught up in soul searching, they don’t take the time to see what’s in front of them. Frustrating, right?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never pursued anyone,” you say.

“Because no one interested you, or because of the inevitable rejection?” He chuckles. “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve heard my fair share of excuses for why I’m not the one. As if I were looking to settle down in the first place . . . Aren’t people _incredibly_ self-absorbed?”

It’s like looking into a mirror and hearing a stranger speak your thoughts aloud. For the first time in your life, unadulterated shock paralyzes you in place. You barely register Belial’s farewell when Beelzebub returns to fetch him, leaving you alone in your office.

The walls seem to close in on the vacant space around you. You shake off your reverie and focus on the work in front of you.

* * *

Your cohorts in the institution look upon your hypothesis with derision. They call it an ignorant scholar’s drivel, doomed since its conception, and you’re somewhat inclined to agree; however, you’re not ready to give up on it.

Ever since you were introduced, Belial has made it a habit to slip into your office on his off-time. You let him stay, even though he talks more than anyone you’ve met before. He talks more than he says, but you pick out the substance in his words with relative ease.

Today he slides inside, drops onto the stool by the door, and wheels himself to your side, his eyes on the papers in your grasp.

“What’s this? I’ve seen you jotting notes down on that slip for a while,” he asks.

“You might call it my color theory,” you answer.

Belial’s brow furrows. While he has no reservations complaining about it, he bores easily at the talk of soulmates and colors.

“Your what, now?”

Your tip the papers toward him. “See for yourself.”

To his credit, Belial does as told. He leans on the edge of your desk and peruses the contents of your papers, his eyes shifting right to left as he does so. At last, he asks, “Is this evidence-based?”

“Where would I have found the evidence?”

“Good point. Well, for something you pulled out of the thin air, it seems like it’d be possible. You didn’t show this to anyone else, did you?”

“It’s my hypothesis. I don’t require their approval or cooperation.”

“You sure are brave. A normal person wouldn’t have shown this to a soul, lest he become the laughing stock of town.” Belial returns your papers, then leans toward you with a grin. “How about making it empirical?”

**Author's Note:**

> Lucilius has an uncanny obsession with Lucifer in my AUs. He loves his ~~precious self-insert~~ baby brother a lot.
> 
> Lucifer's unprejudiced company is the main reason that Lucilius functions, because nihilism sucks. He has no sense of self-worth. It says a lot that his so-called theory could have applied to himself (in that he could have fostered a bond with anyone), but he chose to use it solely for the sake of completing Lucifer's deficient vision through a morally reprehensible route. He's a disaster.
> 
> Incidentally, Beelzebub and Belial were both involved in Sandalphon's case for reasons of their own.


End file.
